Most gardeners want to produce a personal Eden that they can enjoy and share with friends and family; a beautifully planted garden is a wonderful way to show off your personality and creativity.

An effective route to the garden ‘wow’ factor is a wide range of beautiful, colourful blooms. As summer arrives your garden will no doubt play host to guests, so if you want to impress them, look no further than our five favourite plants to add a flood of colour to your garden this season!

A splash of purple with the Butterfly Bush

Not only does this species of lilac look beautiful, but it smells fantastic as well! Growing up to ten feet, this bush blooms all through summer into early autumn in purples, pinks, blues and whites. We love it because it is relatively low maintenance, requiring dead-heading in summer, but little else, and it blooms for much longer than other lilac plants. However, Butterfly Bushes are extremely vulnerable to the cold of winter, so don’t be surprised if they suffer or need replacing.

Add drama with a Wedding Hydrangea

We love a Hydrangea at STIHL. They’re big, dramatic and easy to manage; perfect for a show-stopping garden centrepiece. The ‘wedding’ varieties are named as such for a couple of reasons; they are excellent flowers for a bridal bouquet, and also because they can also look like a bride’s gown. An advantage of this Hydrangea over others is that they are a reblooming variety, so the flowers will not dull over the summer, repeatedly bursting into life. However, like the Butterfly Bush, the Hydrangea is extremely fragile in winter, so be careful!

Brighten the shade with Summersweet

In our experience, most brightly coloured plants are sun-hogs, which is a shame as it’s usually the shady areas that need brightening up. This is why the Summersweet is a popular choice for us, it’s extremely low maintenance and doesn’t need direct sunlight to thrive. Producing a long, thin lance of brightly coloured flowers in various shades of pink and white, the Summersweet also smells wonderful. Look out for it starting to bloom in July through to September.

Add depth with the Rose of Sharon

As much as we love this plant, we must begin this with a warning: these are extremely fast spreaders and it’s very hard to get rid of the seedlings. We’d recommend you seek out sterile versions of the flower, such as the popular ‘Minerva’. If you do, you’ll have a beautiful, purple-blue flower with a complexity to it that is stunning to behold. These plants like a lot of sunlight and relatively dry soil, making them difficult to grow in Britain, but the colours they offer up during the summer months are so breath-taking, the reward is worth the effort.

Enjoy the simplicity of the Bluebeard Shrub

This is one of our absolute favourites, due to the soft colouring and airy nature of the plant. Blooming through August and September, the Bluebeard Shrub is a huge favourite of butterflies, and incredibly easy to look after, able to withstand the very worst that British summertime can throw at it. Simply place in a sunny spot and leave it be; it won’t grow beyond a metre tall and only needs to be watered in the very worst of droughts. So you can sit back, relax, and enjoy the soft beauty of this plant with very little effort required!

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